Presentation Guidelines

We STRONGLY suggest that you rehearse your presentation more than once, and time it.

Professor Hal Abelson has provided the following recommendations for structuring your presentations.

Here is a suggested format. You don’t have to follow it exactly, but this will give you the flavor of what we’re looking for.

If you’re going to use slides, you should have no more than 5 slides.

You can have more than one person on the team speak, but if there are multiple speakers, make sure the transitions are smooth. We may be recording the presentations so we may ask you to make sure to speak into the microphone.

In general, your slides should be attractive and colorful and use very few words. Do not put up slides with bullet points and read them. Use your slides to present images (and possibly one or two words) to reinforce and illustrate what you’re saying. The audience should be listening to your words, not reading your slides.

Start with a slide that has the name of your entry/team and a nice image and the names of the team members.

Then switch to slide with a second (even nicer) image and give an elevator pitch for your project.

Here’s a suggested format for an elevator pitch. You don’t have to follow it exactly, but aim for something that this simple and direct:

:NAME is a :THING for :TARGET-MARKET-SEGMENT, unlike
:ALTERNATIVES, :HAS-WINNING-FEATURE

In addition to the image, the words on the slide can be (at most) words to reinforce :THING and :HAS-WINNING-FEATURE.

Now give a scenario that describes how your project will be used. Emphasize how it meets a concrete need. This section should be at ost two slides. It’s a good idea to make this “scenario based”, that is, talk about a particular (imaginary) person, what need they have, and how your project addresses that need.

Now give an outline of a demo, showing how your project is used. Don’t do a real demo (there isn’t time for that) but this part of the talk should give the judges a clear idea of what your project does. Remember that this is a short demo, so you have to restrict it to the most compelling features of your work — try really hard to make the demo reinforce :HAS-WINNING-FEATURE, both in what you show, and in the way you describe what you’re showing.

Now say something about the implementation. Use at most two slides. Diagrams should be very simple. The ostensible goal of this part of the talk is to give the judges a little insight into how the system works, but the real goal is to impress them with how great your team is.